Indexing API Quickstart

The Indexing API allows any site owner to directly notify Google when job posting pages are added or removed. This allows Google to schedule job postings for a fresh crawl, which can lead to higher quality user traffic. Currently, the Indexing API can only be used to crawl job posting pages with job posting structured data. For websites with many short-lived pages like job postings, the Indexing API keeps job postings fresh in search results because it allows updates to be pushed individually.

Here are some of the things you can do with the Indexing API:

Update a URL: Notify Google of a new URL to crawl or that content at a previously-submitted URL has been updated.

Remove a URL: After you delete a page from your servers, notify Google so that we can remove the page from our index and so that we don't attempt to crawl the URL again.

Get the status of a request: Check the last time Google received each kind of notification for a given URL.

Send batch indexing requests: Reduce the number of HTTP connections your client has to make by combining up to 100 calls into a single HTTP request.

Sitemaps and the Indexing API

For job posting URLs, we recommend using the Indexing API instead of sitemaps because the Indexing API prompts Googlebot to crawl your pages sooner than updating the sitemap and pinging Google. However, we still recommend submitting a sitemap for coverage of your entire site.

Get started

To use the Indexing API, follow the steps below.

Complete the prerequisites by enabling the Indexing API, creating a new service account, verifying ownership in Search Console, and getting an access token to authenticate your API call.